


Incidental Violations of Kel Fraternization Code

by Senri



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Canon-Typical Angst, Dirty Talk, F/M, Object Insertion, PWP, Yuleporn, dubcon due to characters sharing a brain and emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:14:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/pseuds/Senri
Summary: Late during the siege on the Fortress of Scattered Needles, Cheris finds herself needing to blow off some steam.  It's a slip that winds up revealing more than she means it to.
Relationships: Ajewen Cheris/Garach Jedao Shkan
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Incidental Violations of Kel Fraternization Code

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/gifts).

Cheris felt like she’d been hit with some kind of exotic that melted people’s brains into gruel. The servitor maneuver had held up, as good as she really could have hoped, and she felt a blood-pounding heady charge because of that. But the suffering. She’d never felt so awful after a campaign before. Nerevor. The sacrificed Kel, not even having been able to fight honestly for themselves, lives laid down to weight a calendrical imbalance.

She had two minds about it: she hoped Kel Command would make her forget that, along with the rest of the pertinent information in the campaign. Shame at the thought: if she’d asked those Kel to lay down their lives, at least she could pay them the respect of her memory.

Her body didn’t know what to do. She could actually feel her heart beating. She wanted badly to sleep, and simultaneously felt a strong urge to leave her quarters and roam around, looking for problems to solve.

“Cheris,” Jedao said. “Stay here and go to sleep.”

“After something like that?” She couldn’t imagine winding down after maneuvers like these. Losses like these. At this point it was hard to imagine ever relaxing again. Cheris found herself pacing the perimeter of her quarters, the huge space unfamiliar again.

“You’re more tired than you realize. If you dress down and lie down you’ll fall asleep. Adrenaline can’t compensate for actual rest forever, Cheris.” He had that neutral tone that became so annoying because if she were really honest, he was being completely reasonable and right.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Bathe then. It will relax you, and you’ll appear more presentable when you return to the bridge.”

She had not lingered in bathing since Jedao’s anchoring. Training did not leave Kel body-shy, and yet thinking in Jedao’s voice while her hands scrubbed her naked body was also - an imbalancing factor.

This suggestion was also irritating because of its essential good sense. Subordinates felt calmer when their superior officer appeared calm.

Cheris hesitated. Her eyes felt subtly grainy, sticky. Fatigue was a major contributor to error during campaigns, every Kel knew that.

“Fine,” she said. “But keep your commentary to yourself while I’m cleaning up.”

Jedao didn’t reply - as good as agreeing. Cheris entered her ablution room. It felt good to scrub down, rake her fingernails over her scalp, scrub breasts and genitals, workmanlike about it, Nirai efficiency, think of nothing. Wonderful respite to be free of Jedao’s voice. Wonderful to think of the ravens of home, flying up in clouds, ant-tracks against the sky, think of how the air next to a large body of water felt different, how the mucous membranes would stay hydrated, not like on the cindermoth. Find a factionless lover to last as long as the next shore leave. Someone to drown herself in, someone to help her forget.

Jedao, true to his word, kept silent; Cheris, going along with it now that she’d started, dressed in a sleeping robe. The hexarchate was built on ritual, for its calendar, its Nirai, Verona, and Kel. The actions loosened something in her. Cheris watched an episode of some interchangeable drama she could barely focus on, the violence overblown and sanitized at the same time, nothing at all like a real battle, and felt her analytical brain roll belly-up in relief. 

Her covers were soft. Cheris made herself a nest, deciding to give the whole “sleep” thing a try since they’d gotten this far. She was clean and as calm as she was going to get.

She blanked her mind.

She counted by sevens, nines, thirteens and seventeens using the old Mwennin counting rhymes taught to children.

She took a derivative. She took a more complex derivative.

It was no good. She couldn’t sleep.

“Cheris,” Jedao said.

She groaned out loud. “I know, I know!”

“It’s very important that you rest.” She had the sense that he was somehow speaking carefully. “We’re nearly done. I know you can tell. You really have to keep your attention up now - if there’s anytime they’ll come back with some kind of desperate, clever suicide gambit, it’ll be around now. You know it’s difficult to find truly uninterrupted rest time.”

“It was no different with infantry,” Cheris snapped, aware that she was being rude in the face of perfect courtesy. Not just rude, but childish. “We didn’t have soft mattresses and down coverlets in infantry either.”

“I’ve commanded infantry too,” Jedao said mildly. “I know what a ground campaign is like.”

“I know that.” She sounded ungrateful and hated it. Cheris flopped over onto her stomach, shrugging her shoulders, trying to settle, itchy? Not itchy. She was wound up.

She’d been putting the feeling off, trying to wait it out but there was no denying it. She was lying in her frankly luxurious general’s quarters, only a disgraced ghost for company, feeling incredibly horny.

“Cheris,” said Jedao.

She ignored him.

“Cheris.”

“_What._”

Damn the man, the criminal, for his drawl, how amiable and gentle he sounded. “I know exactly what’s happening. Let’s get it over with. Consider it self-maintenance to insure you’re at your best on the helm, if that helps.”

It did not.

“Fraternization regulations…”

“No one would call this situation ‘by the book,’” Jedao said dryly. “I’m not corporeal, Cheris. I can’t touch you. We aren’t fraternizing any more than you’d be fraternizing with a Kel standing in front of your door while you watched a skin flick.”

There was something very wrong with that logic. But saying it outright had made the fact of her arousal very definite and more powerful. Cheris groaned in frustration, flipped onto her back, and pulled open her robe.

Jedao’s emotions and memories were supposed to be separate from hers. But there was that time after the shields fell, where she’d felt his clear, intense suicidality… Cheris thought about that while she pinched her nipples. That Nirai who supervised them when it all began certainly had not truly told her everything that could happen when she was bonded to Jedao this way. She couldn’t be sure that Jedao didn’t want this, that his desire couldn’t bleed into hers, that he wasn’t enjoying it.

To Cheris’ dismay, the thought of Jedao there with her, watching her do this, didn’t scale her arousal down one bit. She flipped over onto her stomach and moved to the edge of the bed so she could spread her legs and grind on the corner of the mattress. She was really alone - she didn’t have to think about Jedao there, observing this - she could keep humping the mattress, find the good spot - 

The signifier with its nine eyes moved on the wall.

“Fuck!” Cheris stopped moving, climbed onto the bed, pulled the robe so her breasts were covered. “_Jedao._ You’re being obtrusive.”

He had instructed her to be informal with him, but taking this tone still felt wrong.

“I apologize, Cheris.” His tone was moderated in a way that she found suddenly suspicious. “How would you like me to be more discreet?” 

She didn’t necessarily want him to be more discreet, was part of the problem. She didn’t want him to be more discreet, but she didn’t like those nine eyes locking on her so intensely. “At least,” she muttered, “stop staring that way.”

The ninefox moved the way it had in Jedao’s demonstration with the luckstone. Behind her, or under her, Cheris did not care; she couldn’t see those nine eyes anymore and that was what mattered. She pulled her robe open again. Her heart rate was picking up again, her nipples were still hard. First she pulled off the robe so she was completely naked, then moved back towards the edge of the bed and began grinding again. It was finally feeling good, but she didn’t feel normal somehow, the silence of the moth all wrong, or maybe the idea of Jedao with her, watching her, a ghost away, unable to touch her but seeing.

“How do you think - everything’s going, Jedao?” Cheris said, pausing with her back arched, fingers clenched against the mattress cover.

He spoke as quickly as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “You have it just about in the bag, I think. You should feel pleased with yourself, you won’t be delivering Kel Command the thirty year wait we talked about at first.”

His calm should have been a relief. It should have soothed her. It _did_ soothe her, but it was also infuriating that he should sound so distant while she was here, close in, so close she had to breathe in all the fumes. Cheris drove herself against the mattress, tongue curling, panting; it felt good, little crests of pleasure rolling through her, but she wanted - she wanted - 

Usually Cheris preferred female partners. Anchoring with Jedao had done something to her, maybe it was thinking in his voice, because she felt like if he was there in the flesh, she could have made due with that; she would have wanted his hands, his voice, his cock. 

She got off the bed and paced across her quarters. Kel Command had equipped her with simulations, with toys. She didn’t want a toy though. The campaign had been much too real to turn to that. Her calendrical sword, the blade deactivated, just the hilt. That would work.

“Cheris,” Jedao said, voice close to her as if he were right at her heels. He sounded worried all of a sudden. 

“I’m not planning to throw myself on it at this point,” Cheris said, fighting a lightheaded desire to laugh. She climbed back on the bed and knelt. The swords were meant to be idiot proof but this was far from regulation usage, so she turned the hilt so that if activated, the blade would not discharge into her body. “Don’t worry.”

Jedao made a tiny, indecipherable noise as she rocked back onto the hilt. She was wet, not quite enough, and it slid but wasn’t comfortable; Cheris forced herself onward ruthlessly til it was deep in her. 

The hilt bottomed out. “I don’t know how you stood it.” She was sweating again, ruining the shower’s job, full and uncomfortable and sweating, wishing Jedao were there with her in truth - awful, enticing thought.

“What’s the alternative?” Jedao’s voice had acquired that hoarse quality she’d noticed sometimes before. Aroused? Grieving? She couldn’t tell. “Lay down the sword, see not just your own soldiers slaughtered, but your people too?”

“I just saw my own soldiers slaughtered during that flight.” She pushed her hips down on the sword-hilt in a series of quick, forceful jerks, the motions becoming easier, endorphins and warming up to it probably. “I put them on the chopping block myself. What’s the difference?”

“You did what you had to do to bait the trap. This is what the hexarchate has always demanded.”

Cheris kept one hand on the sword hilt and brought the back of her other hand to her lips, kissing down on it. Then she turned her hand and moved and bit her forearm hard. _My teeth will have to do,_ Jedao had said that. She bit her forearm again and again, placing bites closer and closer to her elbow, clenching around the sword hilt. It felt good to hurt.

“I wish you were here,” she admitted, when she’d finished biting. “I want… I’d ask you to… I’d like you to use the sword…”

Set to dueling mode, he could flog her across the ass, back and thighs with it. It twisted her up inside as tight as the curve in a seashell, _superior officer, hawkfucker,_ but Jedao had been through more hellish campaigns than this, she supposed. And if he took it upon himself to set the blade to kill and make it an execution strike she’d get what she deserved for trusting her naked body to the arch-traitor. 

“You’re cunning, Cheris,” Jedao said. He sounded nearly tender, which made it all much worse; he was _likeable_, thoughtful, it was easy to forget how many of his most trusted comrades he’d once murdered. “You would have thrived in the Nirai track but I think you’d have had potential with the Shuos too.” Cheris rolled onto her side from the kneeling position, leaving the sword hilt in, and stretched her legs in something approaching a lunge position.

‘I deserve to be reconditioned just for entertaining this with you,’ Cheris said, switching to subvocals. ‘You’re trying to manipulate me.’

A redundant statement; the mad general certainly always was.

“I’m not.” An outright denial was as suspicious as acceding to her accusation. “I know you won’t believe me. But it’s the truth: the servitor maneuver was clever, outside-the-box thinking, and Shuos have always liked that. I never would have thought of using them.”

‘They’re my friends!’ Cheris exploded. ‘I didn’t want to _use_ them -’’

“You’re more compassionate than I expected. I want you to succeed,” Jedao said. Cheris tucked her chin, grabbed the sword hilt, fucked it into herself vengefully. Her hips moved on the rhythm now without her having to try and coordinate. 

“You were wasted in infantry, Cheris,” Jedao said, gaining momentum, if she was any judge. “The general’s wings actually suit you. That hasn’t been true for all of my anchors.”

‘Why are you doing this?’ Cheris demanded. She switched arms and began biting down her forearm again, towards the elbow. She’d forget all about Jedao during reconditioning, and that would be good, because she’d be ruined as a Kel after this - that lover on shore leave would have to be a man for once, someone who looked enough like him, with the floppy hair and the face that became more appealing with a smile on it, and the height -

She shoved the sword hilt in as far as she could, keening as she did, and found her clit between her fingers, pinched it brutally. It hurt, it felt good, appropriate recompense for a soldier lying down with a traitor. ‘Don’t insult your other anchors to my face.’

Worthy Kel, probably, at least for the most part. Worthy Kel who’d probably been eaten alive by him - like she would be, like she was indulging, inviting - 

“I’d love to be there with you, Cheris,” Jedao said. “Not crossing fraternization lines, but _with_ you.”

“You’re four hundred years dead,” Cheris moaned. She couldn’t stop herself switching back to speaking. “Even if you’d never… even if you’d done your duty right…”

She pulled the sword hilt out and set it carefully next to her head. She could smell herself, a salty, musky, rising smell, and feel herself twitching at the withdrawal. She replaced the sword hilt with three fingers, drawing her touch against herself, twitching forward, suddenly, horribly, wanting to cry.

“I’d do what you wanted,” Jedao said. He seemed to have slipped his grip on something. “If you wanted me to hurt you I’d hurt you and if you wanted me to spoil you I’d do that. I’d like to tie your hands and put you on your back and push your thighs up so I could eat you out -” (Cheris curved her fingers hard against herself, bearing down on them, gasping.) “Then if you let me, I’d fuck you like that, and after I came in you, I’d eat you out again.”

“Please - “

“And after I did that I think I’d have it in me to fuck you again. It would be my pleasure. If you wanted me to flog you with that sword, I’d do that until you screamed. It would be my privilege to serve a top-notch Kel like you however you wanted -”

Like she’d been rotated thirty-five degrees clockwise inside herself Cheris listened to herself moan. “_Stop, stooop,_” which wasn’t what she wanted at all, but for him to keep going, thrusting forward so hard and seditiously wishing he were there, both of them in the flesh, walking down the cobbled streets in the city of ravens, enjoying a meal at one of the traditional finger-foods restaurants by the riverside, retreating to an apartment near enough the water to always hear it, where he could twist her arm behind her back and contain her strength with his superior height and weight and fuck her so hard every thought would be driven out of her mind.

“I’m going to forget all about you,” she whimpered. Her hair was sticking to her forehead, her cunt clenching around her fingers. “You died four hundred years ago.”

It was going to be so hard, impossibly hard, to part with him, the brutal, elegant madman, the slaughterer of millions with the nerve to seem _gentle_, sometimes, in their day to day.

“I don’t know how you like it,” Jedao continued, inexorable, “But I’d be thrilled to learn. I’d put you on your hands and knees, have you from behind, I’d _love_ to put you on your back and see your face during.”

“Plee-ease.” Cheris drove herself faster, pushing onward. An impossible wish, a seditious desire, to share this with him. “I’d want you to - I’d have liked to have known you -”

“It would be my pleasure to serve at the will of a general like you,” Jedao carried on, drawl catching. She was never going to be able to find someone with that accent. “Even if you preferred women after me, I wouldn’t mind being the one just to warm you up. I’d be beyond glad to just lick you out and then pass you to them with a smile. If you’d just let me touch you, see that you were pleased, just that much would be more than enough for me -”

Cheris came around her fingers shuddering, harder than she had in a long, long while. _Jedao._ She’d like to run her fingers through his hair, see that wide mouth moved in a smile, touch her lips to the scar on his neck.

_Don’t forget what he’s done._ Impossible to do that. And yet his kindness, striped with almost irreconcilable cruelty. The mad general perhaps hadn’t always been mad, something had sent him that way, and maybe he’d sent her successfully mad as well, insanity spreading like a contagion. Cheris laid on her back knuckle-deep in herself wishing her were there with her. How little she understood him. Chills rose on her skin at the thought.

“Alright. Alright, enough.” Horribly, she wanted to cry. The past was the past and history was history, enshrined now, and the worst parts of it were no propaganda trick.

She felt good. She wanted to hear more of that from Jedao. She was going to miss him so _much_ when he was taken from her, only she wasn’t, it would be erased from her memory and she’d return to the field or to home having done her duty to the hexarchate, even the sorrow of knowing he’d depart would be gone, it would be for the best.

Jedao said nothing. Cheris pulled her fingers out of herself with an unromantic squelch and took up the sword hilt again.

In whatever intersecting layer of reality Jedao inhabited, perhaps he also struggled to master himself. Impossible to tell. Either way, he was silent as Cheris activated the calendrical sword.

Blue at the hilt, red at the tip - half Shuos colors. She closed her eyes. If she’d had to write a status report on herself right then, she would have been lost for words.

“Get your sleep,” Jedao said. Voice back to normal. “It’s overdue.”

Cheris closed her eyes. Indistinct shapes like amoeba bobbled around, colored red and blue by the light of the blade shining through her eyelids.

It hurt to think of Jedao removed from her, locked back in the black cradle. Would he remember her there? Pore over the thought of this evening where they’d both slipped up?

Actually, she’d slipped up. Whether Jedao had, she couldn’t say for certain.

“I’ll miss you,” Cheris said, because it was obvious now, “when you’re gone.”

Jedao said nothing. When she deactivated the blade, it left both of them in darkness.


End file.
